https://jacobin.com/2026/06/birth-rates-capitalism-socialism...
Ahh yes, Russian fertility was famously… lackluster in the Soviet period. So clearly capitalism caused fertility to decline.
The iPhone explains 33–52% of fertility decline among women aged 15–44
31–40 of 66 posts
Re: The iPhone explains 33–52% of fertility decline among women aged 15–44
#32So... Let me get this straight. Because people who had iPhones during the AT&T exclusive period has less kids... They think there is no other possibly explanation besides the iPhone, because they looked at similar groups on different networks and in different areas that didn't yet have coverage for iPhones? It definitely couldn't have been due to richer people having iPhones and having less kids, or people preferring…
The paper has a section listing their controls, including income, poverty rate, race, etc: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35310/w353.... It's on page 11.
Re: The iPhone explains 33–52% of fertility decline among women aged 15–44
#33I'll bite. Maybe it's not the iPhone itself, but social media. I have seen studies about damages that social media can cause in behaviours. This might be one of them. Smartphones are the catalyst to social media consumption as we know. Like people contantly on their phones everywhere instead of interacting with other people, for example.
I don't remember social media really being that significant from 2007-2011.
Re: The iPhone explains 33–52% of fertility decline among women aged 15–44
#34So... Let me get this straight. Because people who had iPhones during the AT&T exclusive period has less kids... They think there is no other possibly explanation besides the iPhone, because they looked at similar groups on different networks and in different areas that didn't yet have coverage for iPhones? It definitely couldn't have been due to richer people having iPhones and having less kids, or people preferring…
Read section 5.
"Table 1 documents that treated counties (those with >90% AT&T 3G coverage) are substantially more urban, White, Republican-leaning, and affluent than control counties. To address this imbalance, we apply the entropy-balancing reweighting of Hainmueller (2012), which solves for the entropy-minimizing set of control-county weights that equalize the treated and reweighted-control means of a specified set of covariates."
Re: The iPhone explains 33–52% of fertility decline among women aged 15–44
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suggest you read the abstract, at least. The fact that only AT&T had the iPhone back then resulted in a natural experiment: It was only available in certain regions. You can thus compare regions where it was available and where it wasn't, while controlling for "richer people" or "people preferring iPhones". As a rule of thumb, if you look at something for 3 minutes and have some obvious questions, the scientists th…
That's for the good studies. Let's not pretend that all published studies are honest. Unfortunately it is quite reasonable to be skeptical about extraordinary claims such as this one.
It's not reasonable when the skepticism is disproven by looking at page 11 of the paper that's in the link.
Re: The iPhone explains 33–52% of fertility decline among women aged 15–44
#36I'll bite. Maybe it's not the iPhone itself, but social media. I have seen studies about damages that social media can cause in behaviours. This might be one of them. Smartphones are the catalyst to social media consumption as we know. Like people contantly on their phones everywhere instead of interacting with other people, for example.
Why not go further? It's the Internet as a whole. People socialising online, and online becoming an actual place people spend their entire lives within, free from the hard constraints of the real world, was the natural evolution of the Internet. Plenty has been written about how any technological innovation leads to massive societal changes no one could foresee, and no one could avoid, but only analyze in retrospect.
Indeed. When Germany unified, the birth rate in the formerly socialist East dropped by half. Certainly increasing uncertainty played a role, but there was also speculation that there wasn't much to do in the East except read, drink, and procreate, while the West had plenty of diversions.
Re: The iPhone explains 33–52% of fertility decline among women aged 15–44
#37[deleted]
Re: The iPhone explains 33–52% of fertility decline among women aged 15–44
#38I'll bite. Maybe it's not the iPhone itself, but social media. I have seen studies about damages that social media can cause in behaviours. This might be one of them. Smartphones are the catalyst to social media consumption as we know. Like people contantly on their phones everywhere instead of interacting with other people, for example.
I don't remember social media really being that significant from 2007-2011.
Well, it was for many. MySpace, and then BBM, Facebook, and Twitter were absolutely huge at that time for the folks using them.
Re: The iPhone explains 33–52% of fertility decline among women aged 15–44
#39So... Let me get this straight. Because people who had iPhones during the AT&T exclusive period has less kids... They think there is no other possibly explanation besides the iPhone, because they looked at similar groups on different networks and in different areas that didn't yet have coverage for iPhones? It definitely couldn't have been due to richer people having iPhones and having less kids, or people preferring…
Nobody at this level writes a paper like this, asserting a specific causal relationship, without considering exactly the questions you raised. The authors address your concerns. It's possible they did so poorly. But that is the case you would want to make. I'm tired of reading these low-effort takes on HN.
Re: The iPhone explains 33–52% of fertility decline among women aged 15–44
#40So... Let me get this straight. Because people who had iPhones during the AT&T exclusive period has less kids... They think there is no other possibly explanation besides the iPhone, because they looked at similar groups on different networks and in different areas that didn't yet have coverage for iPhones? It definitely couldn't have been due to richer people having iPhones and having less kids, or people preferring…
[deleted]